That’s as it should be, advocates of open research say. They argue, among other things, that a substantial portion of the research that publishers attempt to lock behind paywalls was funded with grants paid for by taxpayers, and that the public should therefore have unfettered access to it.

We’re looking for prior art on 100% of the Blackbird Tech patents. If you are interested in helping, take some time to look into those patents where we don’t have anything yet. We’ll update the chart as we review the submissions with additional information about the number we receive, and their quality, to help focus the search. After the initial review, we’ll start to color code the patents (i.e., red/yellow/green) to demonstrate the number and quality of submissions we’ve received on each patent.

The justices sided 8-0 with beverage flavoring company TC Heartland in its legal battle with food and beverage company Kraft Heinz, ruling that patent infringement suits can be filed only in courts located in the jurisdiction where the targeted company is incorporated. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the decision.

There’s no social value here. There’s no support for a maligned inventor. There’s no competing business or product. There’s no validation of an incentive structure that supports innovation. This is a shakedown where a patent troll, Blackbird Technologies, creates as much nuisance as it can so its attorney-principals can try to grab some cash.

Cloudflare does not intend to play along. As explained later in this blog post, we plan to (i) contest the patent lawsuit vigorously, (ii) fund an award for a crowdsourced search for prior art that can be used to invalidate Blackbird patents, and (iii) ask the relevant bar associations to investigate what we consider to be violations of the rules of professional conduct by Blackbird and its attorneys.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform “unauthorized” repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

In short, Steele admits that he and Hansmeier used sham entities to obtain the copyright to (or in some cases film) porn, uploaded it to file-sharing websites, and then filed “false and deceptive” copyright suits against downloaders designed to conceal their role in distributing the films and their stake in the outcomes. They lied to courts themselves, sent others to court to lie, lied at depositions, lied in sworn affidavits, created sham entities as plaintiffs, created fraudulent hacking allegations to try to obtain discovery into the identity of downloaders, used “ruse defendants” (strawmen, in effect) to get courts to approve broad discovery into IP addresses.

n the end, this isn’t a debate about facts, say Masnick’s lawyers. Both Ayyadurai and Masnick acknowledge that the MAILBOX program was created at MIT in the 1960s and that Ray Tomlinson created the “@” symbol protocol in 1971. The two draw different conclusions, however. Ayyadurai calls the ARPANET creations “command-line protocols for transferring text messages” or “primitive electronic communication systems.” In Masnick’s view, Ayyadurai doesn’t dispute the historical facts, but instead “attacks Techdirt’

Microsoft quotes a report from Boston consulting group which estimates a 22% rise in IP lawsuits relating to cloud products over the last five years in the U.S. alone. It also observes that non-practicing entities have increased their spending on cloud patents by 35% over the same period of time.

Patent trolls directly threaten the industry of ideas. They dilute the value of legitimate patents while making honorable companies suspicious of legitimate patent complaints. This was never what patents were all about. They were designed to protect inventors who came up with truly innovative ways of doing things.

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